Iconography: A Writers Meditation

by Renee

Susan Neville, Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003. $15.95 paper (ISBN 0-253-21614-1), 192 pages.

Anyone familiar with Susan Neville’s prose glimpses her Indiana –people in small Midwestern towns waiting for earthquakes and John Mellencamp art exhibits. But in her book, Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation, she delves into mapping her process of writing and the impetus to be a writer. Still filled with physical spaces, Iconography turns in to an interior landscape as she creates a book that is, in fact, the fulfillment of a Lenten promise to write every day.

We begin Neville’s journey of writing and self-understanding in the ramshackle basement turned studio of a downtown Indianapolis Orthodox church, named appropriately, Joy Of All Who Sorrow. Here, Neville begins the process of creating an icon of the Virgin Mary. With only loose ties to the Methodist church, she admits:

“I’m not a religious person. Yesterday my neighbor decided to post the Ten Commandments in his yard and for some reason I wanted to shoot him. I’m the pathetic character in a Flannery O’Connor story.”

Religion is not her motivation to create an icon. She states that she begins this undertaking because she loves the word “icon,” and as she explains, “…I did know that I wanted to paint an icon, and I said that it was because I loved the word. She [her teacher, Mother Catherine] couldn’t hear, I thought, the lower case ‘w.’” Despite her uneasy terms with religion, spirituality is what Neville is searching for, meaning above the surface, like any good metaphor.

After beginning her icon, Neville’s becomes one of many “unfinished Mary’s” in the basement of the Joy Of All Who Sorrow church. When she confesses to Mother Catherine that she doesn’t feel right about making the icon, Neville is given the advice that begins the journey to write this book. “So prepare yourself, she said, and I said how? Tomorrow is the first day of Lent, she said. Make a vow, she said, and try to keep it.” Neville’s vow is that of daily writing, of process and discipline. To the reader of this testament, she doesn’t promise the inner working of her soul, but she does concede to “try very hard not to lie.” What she gives the reader is the insight into the narrative impulse of the writer, the thin line between the writer’s life as a person and desires as an artist.

Words are the basis of Neville’s true craft, which is writing. Beginning with the process of making an icon, Neville pulls us into the world of words, those informed by the art of creative non-fiction. She is repeatedly at odds with the emphasis of “I” in non-fiction, an internal struggle that echoes that of confessional poetry. Early in her narrative she tells us that the drive, or catalyst, for this book is her self absorption. Her question is: “but how do you get outside the ego?”

The ego, depicted by Neville as “I-I-I-I-I” goes through three phases in the book: “Transfiguration,” “Captiva,” and “Home.” “Transfiguration” is the most self-examining, especially of the destructive tendencies of the ego. It’s riddled with Neville’s recurring “mea cuplas,” her dissatisfactions: shopping, professional concerns, her mother’s mental illness and her coping with it. As well, in this section the events of Neville’s everyday life seem to juxtapose themselves with the Susan Neville that is the writer through her own ongoing creation of narrative, sentence by sentence.

“Captiva” is the depiction of her on vacation, and in the tropical paradise of Florida, her sense of herself and writing become transitory, filled with sensory details of light and color. In “Home,” she explores the concept of liminality, or the “shimmering thresholds between worlds.” Hers is the threshold between life and art. She writes, “It was the attention that the discipline of writing itself brings to the world around you that took me to the threshold, and I was so glad of it.” These three phases are framed in the context of the icon making at the Joy of All Who Sorrow church, which begins her journey and brings it to its logical conclusion: acceptance. In the end, Neville strikes an uneasy balance and her daily writing becomes a kind of devoutness, a faith in her ability and in the craft.

At times it seems that she will not return to her metaphor of the icon. However, Neville does return, in the end, not only to the metaphor, but to actually completing her icon of Mary. In between, she gives us shopping malls and AIDs patients and neighborhood kids that suddenly and horrifically die. She gives us her suburban life of toting around children and unwanted furniture passed to her from earlier generations. These things are all in their way part of the iconography of her life, imbued with meaning. It becomes the landscape she culls as a writer. Her own icon of Mary becomes a part of that landscape too, which leads her to a kind of spirituality about her life and writing:

“…I realized that the Mary I’d struggled over for so long had sailed away, that she had her own life now beyond me, like my children, like this book, that she contained all the grief I’d felt for those who’d passed or who would continue to pass through my life and my children’s lives, for those who were yet to be born. That she would stay in my house above my desk, unvenerated probably as long as she stayed on my wall, a bit frightening at ties, at times comforting.”

At the end of her narrative, the sense is that it is not only her icon of Mary that has been blessed, but her process of writing. In the words of Mary Catherine, her teacher, “The hardest thing to learn is to trust the process,” which is the end result of Neville’s self-contemplative effort.

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